Nate Silver: uncertainty

Transcript context

…It’s like they want the Iraq War, so to speak, so that people turn on CNN. The irony though is the data the government produces is very well calibrated and doesn’t really have a wet bias. There are a few individual like models for winter weather that do. But I don’t know, it’s been kind of interesting, in my shoes, going from someone who was a total outsider, to someone who has more reputational risk. To a first approximation, I think it might make someone a worse forecaster, potentially. By the way, another thing about the Trump thing I’ve been thinking about is — so my early view, that Trump had a very low chance — not zero, but very low — of winning the nomination was not based on any formal model, per se. I wonder what if I had even like a fairly bad model instead? The good thing about building a statistical model is that it commits you to rules, right? Instead of just kind of saying, “Well, early polls aren’t very predictive and your prior is it currently probably won’t win, therefore, probably not.” It pins you down and says, “Well, OK, early polls aren’t predictive, but at what point do they become more predictive?” When Trump went from being at 25 percent in the polls to 35 percent after Paris and San Bernardino, how significant is that? To have an answer that is set up by an algorithm you designed ahead of time is actually maybe more helpful than people would think. The long way of saying this is that I’m not sure that I’m any better than the average pundit unless I have a model. The disciplining effect of a model, doing your thinking in advance, and setting up rules of evidence is probably quite important. I have a question about the economics and sociology of sports. This has puzzled me for a while. You may have thought about this. But I’m struck by the relatively small number of professional athletes who have come out as being gay. In Hollywood it’s a lot of people, even in Washington, which is a very conservative town, I wouldn’t say it’s a lot of people, but it happens in a quiet kind of way. In sports, why is there so little? If we applied some kind of economic or statistical model, in which sports would you expect to see the new breakthroughs coming when they come?…

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